Reviews
Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers
For op-eds and news articles, plus radio and television appearances, visit the Media page.
Washington Post:"Flower Confidential," by Amy Stewart. Stewart is a fine interviewer and historian, and she does a superb job with this hardcover scoop on "the good, the bad, and the beautiful in the business of flowers." Well-researched details about the cut-flower trade draw you in, and her writing style and character development make the book as good a choice for vacation reading as a novel. You won't finish it in one sitting, as the tale moves from one plant to another.
Engaging and scrupulously reported...“Flower Confidential” is investigative reporting of a gentle sort.
Boston Globe:Revelatory...informative at every level...and commendably fair-minded. Stewart shows in stunning detail that every aspect of producing flowers for the cut-flower market has been abstracted into its elements.
Berkeley Daily Planet:Who could resist a title like Flower Confidential? Actually, anything by Amy Stewart would be hard to resist.
Scientific American:Surprising and intriguing...an intelligent, evenhanded account. Flower Confidential is the rare nonfiction book that keeps you turning pages. [Stewart's] own passion for flowers, along with her adventures in the fields, greenhouses, auction houses and laboratories, gives the facts life.
E/The Environmental Magazine:A concise, engaging, sometimes humorous expose of the worldwide multibillion-dollar cut flower industry."
Orion:[Flower Confidential]succeeds in offering richly detailed information about the genetic engineering and breeding of flowers, and the growing organic and fair-trade movements around the world. Stewart also provides interesting historical notes, including a look at how the Romans in the first century AD had a highly developed flower trade, manipulating flowers to bloom out of season using steam or hot water in some of the earliest greenhouses.
Jack Covert, 800-CEO-READS:This is a straight-forward account of a very large business, and yet she tells the story with a wide-eyed innocence and humor that is fun to read.... Like the industry itself, this book is fresh, different, and while it may be a little self-indulgent to include it in a set of business book reviews, I truly believe that you will enjoy this book.
Flower Confidential is a February Booksense pick!
"Amy Stewart's great new book recounts the often amazing and fascinating story of the cut flower industry. It's wonderfully readable, and you will never look at a gerbera daisy with the same eyes again!" -- Lyn Dulkinys, Anderson's Bookshop, Naperville, IL
Fran Sorin, author of Digging Deep:For any gardeners who love cut flowers, and who doesn’t, the must read book this season is Flower Confidential...In several respects, Flower Confidential is reminiscent of the book The Orchid Thief, which is no small feat. You’ll relish this book as soon as you read the first page.
Sharman Apt Russell, author of Anatomy of a Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers:Is there any romance left in the genetically designed daisy? Does that sunflower come with too high a social price? Stewart raises some thorny questions...If your ideas about flowers still hark back to my grandmother’s day -- the rich smell of earth, the loving hands of the gardener -- then Amy Stewart’s Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers will make you rethink that Easter lily or Mother’s Day bouquet.
Los Angeles Times:Cut flowers are part of the global marketplace, after all, and Stewart prompts shoppers to think hard about where their stems come from and how they got to market. The book may just get readers to see bouquets in a whole new light.
Christian Science Monitor:Stewart has come not just to skewer the flower industry but rather to examine it, and this she does thoroughly and in highly readable prose...It all makes for a "gosh-how-interesting- I-never-thought- about-that" kind of read.
New York Times profile by Charles McGrath:
Ms. Stewart is the author of "Flower Confidential," a book that comes out today from Algonquin and is part confession, in which she owns up to her "generalized, smutty sort of lust for flowers," and part expose, in which she describes how the business has become so industrialized that a flower's greatest asset these days is not its beauty or its fragrance but its durability as freight.
Stewart's journey takes us down many paths, all connected by her own curiosity and highly readable prose. The greatest value of Flower Confidential, however, is that it was written at all. We know so little of the ways simple daily items are brought to us that such a book helps us grasp our modern world. Who knows? Flower Confidential may compel us to return to something purer, more local.
Thanks to Amy Stewart's Flower Confidential, you'll learn a whole lot more about the big business of flowers. If books had genetic lines, Flower Confidential would carry its pedigree from Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire... Stewart can hardly keep her passion for flowers, or the internal transcript of her thoughts, off the page--and in this case, that's a good thing... Flower Confidential attains the uncommon rank of a non-fiction book that is equally as rewarding to the reader for its storytelling as it is for its content.Even if you're not into flowers, it's fascinating to see how a major industry is built around such a short-lived, aesthetic luxury.
A fascinating tour of the $40 billion floral industry. Along with the V-Day bouquet, pick up a book that's bound to have a nice long shelf-life.
A quirky but entertaining book...Romantic to a fault, Ms. Stewart finds a lot to cherish in her visits to the modern-day flower farms of northern California and Holland....Stewart is the good-natured outsider--occasionally dishing the dirt but usually celebrating the beautiful things that grow in it.
This is not your mother's flower garden...Stewart is an acute observer and intelligent writer, and "Flower Confidential" is a compelling read.
Here's an inside look at the flower trade that follows the plants from the hybridizers' laboratories to the greenhouses of California and the flower fields of Central and South America...I don't remember when I enjoyed reading a work of non-fiction this much.
An utterly fascinating new book...a surprisingly fast-paced narrative... But Stewart's greatest strength is her utter curiosity and diligence in getting behind the scenes in the flower business and finding people, places and scenes that impart drama to her tale. She has the soul of a unrestrained flower lover, the moxie of an investigative journalist...The cut flower business turns out to be far more complex than most people realize. Stewart's "Flower Confidential" often enthralls but also opens eyes.
Groundbreaking...an entertaining read. Informed by history and steeped in cut-flower trade facts, "Flower Confidential" tracks hybridizers, geneticists, farmers and petal pushers from around the world who have worked for over a century to create and produce larger, more vibrant and longer-lasting cut flowers.
A glorious little book, informative but fun to read, personal and environmentally conscious but clear-eyed in its acknowledgment of a world culture that demands global production and shipping in even its most fragile of commodities. While she does not hesitate to question various working conditions and the use of pesticides, both inside the U.S. and out, Stewart wisely lays bare the information she's garnered and allows readers to see for themselves how complex all such interrelated issues as economics, environmentalism, and social welfare are. In the end it's a love story about the millions of living things that give their lives to become offerings in others' love stories.
A thorns-and-all expose of the blossom business...[Stewart] visits small, well-kept-secret shops (like the NYC gem Flowers of the World) and high-volume discounters ($700 will get you an entire wedding's worth of roses at Costco), and her cut-flower care guide is stem-tastic: To keep your Valentine's Day bouquet fresh for days, add a pinch of crushed Viagra.
In Flower Confidential, Amy Stewart investigates the industry that produces the 4 billion stems bought in the US annually. She shares some fun (and not so fun) facts.
Everyone in the cut-flower industry should read Amy Stewart's new book...Flower-loving consumers should read this book, too. Within a lively personal narrative, Stewart shares her well-researched insights into the $40 billion industry. Stewart's broad curiosity and romantic appreciation of flowers' power to reconcile, flatter and console have clearly persuaded people in every aspect of the industry to open up to her.
A brilliant horticultural writer...Stewart’s book gives a dramatic overview of the centuries-old trade, illustrating the life of industry flora from growth to sale.Amy Stewart is, as she puts it, "a gardener and passionate consumer of flowers." Add "fine writer" to that list, too. All three--her gardening knowledge, her passion and her way with words come through in "Flower Confidential."
Ms. Stewart traveled the world to learn about industry developments, to Amsterdam, Ecuador, Miami and up and down the coast of California, visiting flower factories as well as family farms established, in the case of California, by immigrants from Italy and Japan. There's plenty of high-tech and history in her well-researched (and annotated) accounts. But embedded in the industry trends and headlines are the gems that make the book worth buying and reading.
A new book every flower lover should read...[Stewart] gives lessons in botany and big business, history and horticulture. She enlightens and entertains; she poses questions and offers opinions. And she does it with style.
Like Susan Orlean, author of “The Orchid Thief,” and Diane Ackerman (“Natural History of the Senses”), Stewart is a storytelling journalist who uses people to illustrate her points. In “Flower Confidential” she details the triumphs and trials of nurserymen and hybridizers alike.
Chicago Sun Times:
Stewart gives us an insider's perspective of this monster industry with a cool reporter's eye and fills it out with intimate portraits of people who live their passion for flowers -- and she writes it with a gardener's soul. With Valentine's Day just around the corner, a single red rose will never look the same after reading this book -- not just a book for flower geeks. ...She acts as a present-day Columbo as she uncovers answers to unusual questions. Can adding Viagra to a vase of cut flowers prolong their life? Will we be declaring our love with a bouquet of blue roses in the near future? Why have some flowers lost their seductive scent?
[Stewart] peeks into many of the world's greenhouses and flower markets with a contagious enthusiasm for discovery.
A fascinating account of the cut flower industry..Stewart tries to reconcile the inherent contradiction between the business perception of flowers as just another commodity and the common perception of flowers as something delicate, sentimental, and unspoiled...Although Stewart's experiences have made her look at flowers a little differently, for her, they have not lost their magic.
An enthusiastic, eye-opening take on the floral trade.
Stewart's book is filled with surprises and interesting facts...With Valentine's Day approaching, Stewart gives everyone something to think about before they buy those dozen roses.
An enlightening but poignant account of the flower industry...Everyone craves the perfect flower - from color to vase life. But at what price do we continue to demand and tinker with perfection? Therein lies the thought-provoking question of what the author addresses so effectively in her book. With an elegant and down-to-earth style and an infectious admiration for her topic, Stewart has written the definitive read on the international floral market.
In a potent medium of quirky wit, incisive reporting and occasionally breathtaking prose, Stewart grows her strange and riveting tale...Flower Confidential is a page-turner. I read avidly to its end, madly curious to know if, after all she had witnessed, Stewart's floral romanticism remained. In the book's ironically captivating epilogue, I found out. But I'm not telling.
Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart does something most professors only dream of doing: It makes flowers interesting....The book captures the attention of the everday person with legends of the first blue rose and the race to make the perfect flower...Stewart's writing is impressive.
A comprehensive, exhaustive study of the cut flower business...a book filled with "Wow, I didn't know that!" moments. Stewart's love of flowers and her continual awareness of them as a gardener and consumer make this a sensitive recounting, filled with personal anecdotes. Flowers touch a deep chord in us all. As a gardener, I still love to shop for cut flowers in any season, even when I can snip them close at hand. None of the information in Flower Confidential will change that, but now I can satisfy my flower jones in a much more knowledgeable fashion.
This engaging exploration won't make you feel guilty about buying a bouquet, but it will make you much more informed--and intrigued--by where it came from.
Flowers&, the Teleflora magazine:
Some will jeer, others will cheer, but everyone in the flower business will have an opinion...Stewart pulls no punches in reporting on the issues, especially the use of pesticides. On the whole, however, Flower Confidential is a sympathetic report, fair-minded and thoroughly researched. It's also a good read: Stewart has a gift for turning dry facts into compelling stories.
This engaging exploration won't make you feel guilty about buying a bouquet, but it will make you much more informed--and intrigued--by where it came from.
Booklist:
Along with the making of sausage and politics, flowers can now be added to the list of commodities that it's best to look upon from afar. Who knew floriculture--the big business behind those little blossoms-- could be sabotaged by internecine skirmishes, sullied by sexual harassment, and contaminated by industrial pollution? Yet there's good news, too: organic growers as concerned with the welfare of their workers as they are with the health of the environment, and innovative local entrepreneurs providing creative alternatives to impersonal toll-free ordering hotlines. From the Netherlands to Ecuador, Stewart traveled the world, tracking the scent of the hottest stories in a $40 billion per year international industry. What does it take to bring those three-for-$10 bouquets to Wal-Mart? Why don't roses smell like roses anymore? And if a blue rose can be produced, would anyone buy it? As candid as she is circumspect, Stewart combines a romantic's idealism with a journalist's objectivity in this tantalizing expose.
Stacy Mitchell, author of Big-Box Swindle:
Splendid--Stewart takes an everyday item that is completely opaque to most people and gives it a history, an economics, a geography and an ethics. I loved it.
A bouquet of pleasant surprises...If like most Americans you buy flowers at some point during the year � for a funeral, for a wedding, for romancing the one you love � you�ll enjoy this marvelous account of where those flowers came from and the work it took to put them into your hands.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2006An engaging mix of botany, history and commerce highlighted by profiles of flower mavens and close-ups of rare flowers. Stewart, a flower lover and horticultural writer ( The Earth Moved, 2003, etc.), traveled the world for a year to research the $40 billion dollar cut-flower industry. On the road, she spends time with a third-generation California violet grower, who still does things the old-fashioned way; with the CEO of the largest producer of cut flowers in the United States; and with a Dutch flower breeder and grower whose high-tech operation, run with Polish immigrant labor, is producing flowers in novel colors and shapes. She visits the huge Dutch flower auction in Alsmeer, through which flows half of the world's cut flower production, and the world-famous Ecuadorean floriculture trade show outside Quito. Interspersed are profiles of the breeder of the popular Stargazer lily and of the proprietor of a tiny retail flower shop in Santa Cruz, as well as mini-essays on flower anatomy (with line drawings), propagation techniques and the dipping and dyeing of flowers. Appendices provide how-to information on cut-flower care and statistics on flower commerce. The author also raises environmental issues related to the trade, as well as the concerns of florists. Stewart writes with humor and insight about real people, entertaining as she informs.
Publishers Weekly. October 2, 2006:
Stewart, an avid gardener and winner of the 2005 California Horticultural Society's Writer's Award for her book The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, now tackles the global flower industry. Her investigations take her from an eccentric lily breeder to an Australian business with the alchemical mission of creating a blue rose. She visits a romantically anachronistic violet grower, the largest remaining California grower of cut flowers and a Dutch breeder employing high-tech methods to develop flowers in equatorial countries where wages are low. Stewart follows a rose from the remote Ecuadoran greenhouse where it's grown to the American retailer where it's finally sold, and visits a huge, stock �exchange� like Dutch flower auction. These present-day adventures are interspersed with fascinating histories of the various aspects of flower culture, propagation and commerce. Stewart's floral romanticism�she admits early on that she's "always had a generalized, smutty sort of lust for flowers" �survives the potentially disillusioning revelations of the flower biz, though her passion only falters a few times, as when she witnesses roses being dipped in fungicide in preparation for export. By the end, this book is as lush as the flowers it describes.
Author and syndicated columnist Maureen "Mo" Gilmer:
You won't realize just how little you know about flowers until you read Amy Stewart's book. It's a very rare good read in a crowded field, perhaps because the writer is more than journalist or reporter, she interacts with the subject matter in a surprisingly intimate way. That degree of passion can transform the technicalities of day length, genetics and humidity into the stuff of good storytelling. And only through the human story can we truly touch our readers. I know that I'll never see a cut flower the same way again. Thanks to Flower Confidential, I've gained a deep appreciation for all that's required to get that perfect flower from breeder to my living room.